


words in red ink

by vanillanemo



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Knives, Self-Harm, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 12:14:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19356823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillanemo/pseuds/vanillanemo
Summary: Fifteen years old, and Vanya's forming an addiction, just like Klaus. His addiction, to the drugs pumping through his veins, to the soaring highs that make all of the ghosts go away. Hers? To the slice of the knife over her skin, to the blood that drips on the bathroom floor, to the pain that grounds her because she can feel it like she can't feel anything else.





	words in red ink

They're fifteen years old, and Diego comes back from a mission to find himself short a knife. Its not unusual, even though he swears that the missing one had been left at the house on the mission. Something easily forgotten though, and that works to her advantage. After all, who would ever expect ordinary little Number Seven to have stolen from one of her brothers?  
Fifteen years old, and Vanya's forming an addiction, just like Klaus. His addiction, to the drugs pumping through his veins, to the soaring highs that make all of the ghosts go away. Hers? To the slice of the knife over her skin, to the blood that drips on the bathroom floor, to the pain that grounds her because she can  _feel_ it like she can't feel anything else.  
The words her siblings fling at her, the words her father calls her, she carves them into her skin, scars herself with them. They're reminders of what she is, what she will always be, just as much as they are a form of catharsis. Their presence on her body makes the insults hurt just a little less, because she's _a_ _ccepted_  these words, these titles, these brands.  
Weak.  
Useless.  
Powerless.  
Ordinary.  
She takes the knife with her when she moves out, tucks it away and only brings it out after she hears from her family.  
Her therapist - who Vanya has never told about the knife but who knows anyway - suggests she try writing with something other than her own blood, and when she sees the typewriter in the window of the pawn shop it makes her pause. Before she knows what she's doing, she's bought it, taken it home.  
Her book makes it onto bestseller lists, though doesn't top them for long. But it gives her a whole new set of words.  
Pathetic, from Luther, during a phone call that he ends before she gets a chance to say anything. Distant and jealous from Allison, who doesn't say them directly to her, doesn't speak to her at all. Traitor, from Klaus, the note pushed under her door in the dead of the night.  
Diego has the most new words for her, and tears well up as she adds bitch, coward, stupid, shallow, wretched, inferior and self-centered. She carves these words deeper, over the bruises where he shoved her, because these words were delivered in person, with more anger than any of her other words, and she feels like that should be reflected.  
Her father gives her no new words, but he'd given her plenty over the years already.  
She recuts them as the scars fade, so that every single letter is decipherable, so that they are always there.  
And when her father dies, she goes back to that house, even knowing she will probably get new words. It takes longer than she expected, but she gets one.  
Liability.   
She goes home, strips out of her clothes - blood is so hard to wash out of fabric - and starts carving, sitting in the bathtub.  
But her head wound is more severe than she thought, and she messes up. She cuts too deep.  
It doesn't scare her, her impending death. She closes her eyes and lets it take her, her final word unfinished, Diego's knife on the floor beside the tub.  
Klaus screams when he sees her, as she slips into the motel room along with all of the victims of those psychos, and Ben chokes back his tears even as he strips off his jacket.  
The evidence is right there in front of them, the evidence of their failure as brothers. And its there in front of Allison, when she picks the lock on Vanya's apartment to check on her, in front of Diego when he's called to provide formal identification of the body, still Vanya's emergency contact all these years later.   
She was hurting for so long and they _never even noticed_.

 


End file.
